How to Manage & Reduce Risk in Business

To manage and reduce risk in any business – from manufacturing, distribution, and healthcare to financial and other B2B/B2C products and services – you must consistently quantify, measure, and enhance every component of your process across the company. Using technology is the only way to do this with any accuracy.

Even if you’re not technologically savvy, it’s easy to minimize risk with business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA), and custom software programs. Once implemented, these business solutions take care of themselves and provide the information you need to reduce risk, increase profitability with less effort, and most importantly, thrive in your business.

By using gut-instinct and hindsight to make business decisions rather than data that shows how all areas of your company are performing, you run the risk of falling behind and losing money, potentially risking it all.

Automate Your Systems

When your employees come to work, how often are they reinventing the wheel with the same tasks day-in and day-out? When employees spend even one and a half times the amount of effort to do the same thing every day, lost production, cash flow, and company culture are all affected. This chain reaction often ends in reduced customer satisfaction, frustrated employees, and ultimately, lost profitability.

If your business system is manual or it no longer fulfills your needs, you need to take a serious look at how this is exposing your business to more risk.

To eliminate repetitive manual daily tasks, like customers ordering via fax and someone manually inputting the information and following each order through the system, you can build reproducible processes using custom software,  BPA, or RPA, to monitor and dictate efficiencies. 

Using this automation approach gives everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to do their jobs and allows your business to evolve as data flows seamlessly across your organization. 

Benefits of Automating Processes

• Enhances real-time business process systems and reporting.
• Highlights market differentiators.
• Eliminates tribal knowledge; data is available to all.
• Creates reproducible business processes to eliminate repetitive manual tasks.
• Provides a single source of accurate information.
• Allows for better customer service, order precision, delivery.
• Controls inventory and costs associated with too much/not enough.
• Improves receivables and cash-on-hand. 
• Boosts job satisfaction and enriches company culture.
• Offers alignment and transparency in all departments.
• Increases the value of the business and financial leverage when it comes time to sell or exit.

When everyone has what they need to do their jobs with less frustration, they naturally become more efficient and enjoy what they do since they are moving the ball forward and making a difference.

Use Business Intelligence & KPI Dashboards

Still, relying on manual spreadsheets and monthly reporting? If so, you are losing high-dollar, executive wages to manual input and laborious number-crunching; money you don’t even know you’re losing. The old saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” comes to mind. Without key performance indicators (KPIs) readily available on a dashboard, you’re incurring extra costs and going forward blindly, leaving profitability to chance.

If you do not have access to dashboards and other reporting mechanisms, such as Business Intelligence (BI), to look into the core of what is going on in your business, you are missing out on a continual stream of data that allows you to track, improve, strategize, and elevate your company’s productivity and levels of service. 

If this highly informative BI is not automatically being fed into a user-friendly web-based KPI dashboard that provides a running snapshot of processes and performance, accurate tracking will be nearly impossible, and your business risk is significantly increased. 

Benefits of a Deeper Insight into Your Business

• Quantifies risks.
• Provides greater insight.
• Allows for exact planning based on facts rather than hindsight or gut feelings.
• Tracks, improves, and elevates your company’s systems and level of service. 
• Harnesses processes and systems information in one place for maximum efficiency.
• Provides visible key data points at a glance to monitor, manage, and reduce risk.
• Eliminates expensive man-hours on manual data entry and reporting.
• Shows how/where each department’s activities can be improved in relation to the bottom line.
• Delivers accurate measurements for sales/marketing strategies and budgeting.
• Eliminates tribal knowledge; real-time data is available to all. 
• Develops company-wide alignment and transparency.
• Advances company growth with pinpoint efficiency.

If your company is ready to use BI to establish an automated web-based KPI dashboard, your IT department or external software partner can create one that’s customized and organized to provide minute-by-minute, hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly measurements at a glance – data points you absolutely need to reduce risk and provide more insight into your business. 

Data dashboards are currently the most powerful tool to track, monitor, and manage your most important metrics and KPIs. There is no better way to gather complex information, present it in a clear, comprehensible way, and go forward to continuously improve efficiencies with total accuracy.

The Bottom Line … Reduce Risk with Technology

As a business, you must evolve with technology to survive. Especially now, with the increased number of employees working remotely, process automation and access to accurate real-time data are the best ways to manage and reduce risk and increase growth opportunities. 

The simplicity with which you can organize, measure, and modify every component of your business process with technology allows you to operate from a less reactive to a more predictive strategy, improve customer satisfaction, increase profits, and escalate the value of the business. 

If you have any questions about how technology could help reduce risk in your manufacturing, retail, distribution, healthcare, financial, education, or other B2B or B2C organization, the Swip Systems team is here to be a resource for you; we love to help in any way we can. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. 877.377.SWIP